Abstract

Affinity Selection of Extracellular Vesicles using Plastic-based Microfluidic Devices for the Molecular Sub-typing of Breast Cancer Patients

Steve Soper, Foundation Distinguished Professor; Director, Center of BioModular Multi-scale System for Precision Medicine, Adjunct Professor, Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology, The University of Kansas

We have been developing tools for the diagnosis of a variety of diseases. The commonality in these tools is that they consist of microfluidic devices made from plastics via injection molding. Thus, our tools can be mass produced at low-cost to facilitate bench-to-bed side transition and point-of-care testing (PoCT). We have also been generating novel assays focused on using liquid biopsy samples that are enabled using microfluidics. In this presentation I will talk about the evolution of our fabrication efforts of plastic-based microfluidic and nanofluidic devices as well their surface modification to make the devices biocompatible for in vitro diagnostics. One tool that we have generated is a plastic device (38 × 42 mm) that consists of 1.5M pillars, which are surface decorated with affinity agents targeting certain disease-associated extracellular vesicles (EVs). The affinity agents are covalently attached to the surface of the microfluidic device using a hetero-bifunctional linker, which consists of a coumarin moiety to allow for the photolytic release of the captured EVs using a blue-light LED to minimize photodamage to the EVs’ molecular cargo. In this presentation, I will discuss the utility of these microfluidic devices using EVs as a source of mRNAs for molecular sub-typing of breast cancer patients. EVs were affinity selected from breast-cancer patients’ plasma by searching for both epithelial and mesenchymal expressing EVs to allow for highly efficient sub-typing using the PAM50 gene panel.